Ogaga Odjugo

Ogaga Odjugo is a Barrister and Solicitor of the Supreme Court of Nigeria and a co-founder of SOOIA Legal LLP in Abuja, where he advises on regulatory set-up, compliance and commercial disputes. His published research examines how energy statutes perform against their stated objectives: two peer-reviewed papers on petroleum and electricity regulation, the most recent published in Elsevier’s The Electricity Journal in 2026. He is now extending that method to the governance of artificial intelligence.

Ekiti, 2019 to 2024

He left secondary school in 2019 as the best student in the Humanities department and went up to Afe Babalola University in Ado-Ekiti to read law. His classmates elected him course representative for the Class of 2024, a position he held for the length of the degree. In his second year he sat in the Law Students’ Society Legislative House, serving on its orientation and awards committees and taking part in the passage of the Imprest Bill and the Society’s amended constitution.

The advocacy work began in the university’s student chambers. As Head of Research at Jus Gentium Chambers in 2021–22 he prepared the briefs the chambers’ advocates relied on in mock trials, and was conferred the rank of Senior Advocate of ABUAD. The next year, as Head of Litigation, he won the Damilola Olawuyi Moot and Mock Competition and was named Best Counsel.

In 2023 he captained the ABUAD delegation to the Law Students’ Association of Nigeria championships. The team won the South-West regional competition, where he was again named Best Counsel, and went on to take the national title. He coached the following year’s delegation to a second regional win in 2024. In his final year he served as Chief Judge of the Law Students’ Society, drafting the judiciary’s inaugural Code of Conduct and presiding over mock trials that ranged from criminal prosecutions to contractual disputes.

His final-year thesis examined sustainability under the Electricity Act 2023, a statute that has since become the subject of his second published paper. He graduated with First Class Honours in 2024, taking the OGEES Prize for Best Student in Oil and Gas Law and the prize for Best Student in Environmental Law. That year he also attended the Benin International Model United Nations, where he represented the Kingdom of the Netherlands in the Disarmament and International Security Committee, presented a policy brief on autonomous weapons in warfare, and was named Best Delegate.

Research and practice

From 2023 to 2026 he was an Associate Researcher at ABUAD’s Institute for Oil, Gas, Energy, Environment and Sustainable Development, producing research reports on energy and sustainable-development regulation and reviewing nine submissions across three issues of the Scopus-indexed Journal of Sustainable Development Law and Policy. His first paper, a comparative study of petroleum regulation in Nigeria, Norway and Saudi Arabia written with Olusola Joshua Olujobi and Oshobugie Suleiman Irumekhai, appeared in that journal in May 2025.

Between August 2024 and February 2025 he trained at Ajumogobia & Okeke, one of the largest commercial firms in Lagos, drafting more than fifty legal memoranda on taxation, labour, energy transactions, mining and banking compliance and working with Senior Associates on court processes in multi-million-naira litigation.

He entered the Nigerian Law School in 2025. Alongside his studies he founded The AI Reporter, a newsletter on law, technology and governance that ran to seventeen issues and more than 750 subscribers among legal professionals across Africa, and from August 2025 worked part-time as an ESG and Sustainability Policy Analyst at ICELIS Global, a consultancy in the Qatar Financial Centre. There he produced over forty-five policy briefs, roughly one a week, tracking ESG disclosure obligations across Qatar and the Gulf as they were drafted and adopted.

Now

He was called to the Nigerian Bar in July 2026 and co-founded SOOIA Legal LLP the following month, drafting the firm’s partnership agreement under the Companies and Allied Matters Act 2020 and carrying its registration with the Corporate Affairs Commission. His current work includes the regulatory set-up of a dairy-sector food business, covering NAFDAC registration and trade mark filings, and a consumer protection claim under the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Act 2018.

His second paper, on reforming Nigeria’s Electricity Act 2023, written with Joshua Olujobi and Ahmadu Frederick Olusola, appeared in The Electricity Journal in 2026. Two further papers, on law-following AI, are in preparation.